Page 75 of Ghost’s Awakening

So that was the name. The message was the arm. This was how the man killed, and the men who'd watched him do it had turned it into what they called him, and I'd stood on a mat and made a joke out of it.

I had no breath to hold. That was the piece the choke depended on. A man with full lungs had time. The crash had emptied mine to the bottom, and the bar across my throat let nothing back down. My hands tore at his forearm and couldn't move it an inch. I hammered my heels down and back into his shins, once, twice, and he bellowed against my ear at every hit and the bar came in tighter each time. Every kick I landed cost me air I didn't have.

"He gave you to me." Right against my ear, wet through the broken nose, squeezed thin with the effort of killing me. "You hear that, yoyo? All you had to do was say yes." The lamps smeared. The dust drifting through them doubled itself, went soft at the edges.

I counted, because counting was the last floor I had. Three seconds since air. Four. Somewhere past five the numbers stopped holding their shape, and I had never once in my life lost a count.

Jake. I'm sorry.

His real name. He'd put it in my hands the night before this, in the dark, the two of us holding on. Five nights of learning a man, and on the last one he'd handed me the name under all the others.

And I'd wasted it. I'd looked away twice, at Trenza, at Mateo, and a fighter who looks away pays his whole bill at once. These men were what Gravedigger had spent months building, and looking away had handed them the fight.

I'm sorry.

The dark was closing in from the sides, and I was going to die on this⁠—

CRASH.

The sound came from right behind me, a heavy wet thud and then glass, glass everywhere, bursting across the back of my head and raining down over my shoulders in bright pieces, and the bar across my throat let go.

I didn't ask why. I threw myself forward out of his arms, shoulder rolling me over the glittering mat, and the first breath went down my crushed throat rough and burning, and it was the best thing I had ever swallowed. I came up on one knee, whooping air, and looked back.

Norte stood over Deadlock with the broken neck of a beer glass in his fist.

Gray hair. Blood on his knuckles that wasn't his. Deadlock lay flat on his back under him with red threading out of his scalp into the mat, arms loose, out cold. And a folded map on a compound table came back to me, beers sweating rings onto the wood, and the older man's voice, gravel-slow: You get in trouble in there, you look for gray hair. I'll already be moving.

"Told you." Two words, same gravel, and he wasted nothing else on the moment. His eyes crossed mine for half a second and then he was moving again, off toward the far ropes, because the boxer had Mateo by the hair, the kid folded and one-armed under him, knees swinging at his face while Mateo caught what he could on the good forearm.

Norte hit the man from the side at a dead run. Fist, fist, dragging him off by the collar, fist, and he kept them coming after the man's legs quit, hammering him down into the mat and making sure of it. I turned away and left him to his work.

The air kept coming back. So did I.

Looking at my people had nearly gotten me killed. Looking at my people was also the only reason I was breathing. Both things were true at once, and twenty years of fighting alone had only ever taught me the first one. The crew wasn't a weakness.

The crew was why there'd be a version of me walking out of here at all. Deadlock was down.

Trenza wasn't up.

She lay on her side ten feet away, curled around herself, coughing wet, her loose hair fanned across the mat through the drifting dust. The fog hung low over that whole side of the ring, gray and slow, torn open where bodies had moved through it, and the man walking toward her came out of it a piece at a time. Big through the shoulders. His own face was a mess, one brow split and sheeting red down his cheek, so she'd made him pay coming in. He was taking his time now, a man walking up on something that couldn't run.

Nearby, one more of them had climbed in on her side, and so had Cuervo, and those two were locked up trading punches, shoulders rolling, Cuervo's guard tight, neither man able to spare her a glance.

I had one to spare.

I went without a sound. No shout to warn him, no stance he could read, a dead sprint through the dust with everything the night had left in my legs, and by the time his eye caught me at its corner I was already off the mat and turning. The spin came around whole. My hips whipped through, my right shin arrived at his temple before his arms had climbed halfway, and I felt everything I'd loaded into the tornado kick go through the bone.

His head went sideways with the kick and his body followed it down, all at once, loose everywhere, and he hit the mat and didn't put out a hand to catch himself.

I knew what I'd felt. His skull had cracked under the kick.

I didn't care.

I put myself between Trenza and the rest of the ring, right foot back, hands open at my sides, and across the mat the last of them jumped back out of Cuervo's range with his arms up, eyes jumping man to man, doing his math. Cuervo didn't chase. He crossed to my shoulder instead, breathing hard through his nose, one eye already puffing, and planted himself at my side.

"Sorry we took so long, hermano." He rolled the shoulder of his jab arm, and his voice came out level even now. "Three hundred people shoving for the door, and every one of them between us and this ring." I nodded once. My throat wasn't ready for words yet.

The boxer looked around at what was left of his side. Deadlock flat on his back with glass around him. His kicker gone over the ropes. Norte kneeling on the third man's arms, still driving his fist down into a face that had stopped moving under it. Two of us standing side by side in front of the woman he'd come to finish, and behind us, out in the fog, the sound of the Phoenixes tearing through his people. If he wanted to run, this was the moment for it, and I watched him find that same math.